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Editor's Note: Any reference to TheStreet Ratings and its underlying recommendation does not reflect the opinion of TheStreet, Inc. or any of its contributors including Jim Cramer or Stephanie Link.

Trade-Ideas LLC identified
Dominion Resources (
D) as an unusual social activity candidate. In addition to specific proprietary factors, Trade-Ideas identified Dominion Resources as such a stock due to the following factors:

D has 12x the normal benchmarked social activity for this time of the day compared to its average of 1.75 mentions/day.

D has an average dollar-volume (as measured by average daily share volume multiplied by share price) of $185.5 million.

Identifying stocks with 'Unusual Social Activity' tends to be a valuable process for traders looking to capitalize on the 'talk of the town' stocks that are basking in far more attention from the StockTwits financial community than normal. Good press? Bad press? It ultimately doesn't matter if it's good or bad if you know how to trade around the sentiment. Certain hedge funds use such data for their proprietary algorithms and it is not uncommon to see shared social sentiment play itself out in a stock's price trend.

Dominion Resources, Inc., together with its subsidiaries, engages in producing and transporting energy in the United States. The company operates through three segments: Dominion Virginia Power (DVP), Dominion Generation, and Dominion Energy. The stock currently has a dividend yield of 3.8%. D has a PE ratio of 112.7. Currently there are 7 analysts that rate Dominion Resources a buy, no analysts rate it a sell, and 8 rate it a hold.

The average volume for Dominion Resources has been 2.7 million shares per day over the past 30 days. Dominion has a market cap of $33.9 billion and is part of the utilities sector and utilities industry. The stock has a beta of 0.07 and a short float of 2.1% with 3.99 days to cover. Shares are up 13.1% year to date as of the close of trading on Thursday.

TheStreet Quant Ratings rates Dominion Resources as a
buy. The company's strongest point has been its a solid financial position based on a variety of debt and liquidity measures that we have looked at. We feel these strengths outweigh the fact that the company has had sub par growth in net income.

Highlights from the ratings report include:

Regardless of the drop in revenue, the company managed to outperform against the industry average of 2.6%. Since the same quarter one year prior, revenues slightly dropped by 0.8%. The declining revenue appears to have seeped down to the company's bottom line, decreasing earnings per share.

DOMINION RESOURCES INC's earnings per share declined by 7.8% in the most recent quarter compared to the same quarter a year ago. The company has suffered a declining pattern of earnings per share over the past two years. However, we anticipate this trend to reverse over the coming year. During the past fiscal year, DOMINION RESOURCES INC reported lower earnings of $0.61 versus $2.48 in the prior year. This year, the market expects an improvement in earnings ($3.34 versus $0.61).

Compared to where it was 12 months ago, the stock is up, but it has so far lagged the appreciation in the S&P 500. Looking ahead, the stock's rise over the last year has already helped drive it to a level which is relatively expensive compared to the rest of its industry. We feel, however, that the other strengths this company displays justify these higher price levels.

The company, on the basis of change in net income from the same quarter one year ago, has significantly underperformed against the S&P 500 and did not exceed that of the Multi-Utilities industry. The net income has decreased by 21.7% when compared to the same quarter one year ago, dropping from $258.00 million to $202.00 million.

Currently the debt-to-equity ratio of 1.96 is quite high overall and when compared to the industry average, suggesting that the current management of debt levels should be re-evaluated. Along with this, the company manages to maintain a quick ratio of 0.25, which clearly demonstrates the inability to cover short-term cash needs.